Voces del Prado

The history of all the different premises

Nuria de Miguel Poch, General Secretary of the Friends of the Museo del Prado Foundation, 1989-Up to date

The history of the Foundation is the history of its relocations. We were once at the Palace of Villahermosa, which today houses the Thyssen Museum. At the time it was allocated to the Prado, and since they didn't know where to put us they sent us there. I had an office in what is now the main entrance hall of the Thyssen Museum. We then went to the Casón del Buen Retiro. It was the hardest place for someone to become a friend of the Museum because you had to pay the entry fee to the Casón, go up in a lift accompanied by a guard, and when it got to the last floor you had to go up a sort of fire ladder. There was an upper floor, where the guards asked us to walk close to the wall because the floor was sinking in the middle and it was dangerous. That was where we worked for some time. But there were even more incredible premises. With the Villaescusa legacy, the Museum received money and some apartments that were eventually sold to be able to buy paintings. Meanwhile, we used one of the flats in Madrid, they sent us to a flat on Claudio Coello. Finding the Friends of the Prado Museum on the fifth floor of a building on Claudio Coello was complicated. But I can say that we never stopped growing. We grew in spite of everything, and when the people from Aldeasa moved out of the building at Ruiz de Alarcón, the whole administration of the Prado Museum went there, and downstairs in the first basement they took out everything so that we could set up our offices there, and that's where we have been since then.
It's a great office because you can enter directly from the street, which is much more practical for the Friends of the Museum, because we're right across the street. The novelty was when we had a reception counter in the hall, it was really great for making friends in the Museum.